#vfxlife
Honestly, there is no better format to show other departments a reference of what you're seeing on the screen right now. If only Jpeg could store timecode metadata...
I don't remember exactly but I think the tracking was part Nuke 3D tracking plus additional stabilisation using a planar tracker for each bag.
All the cuts were from photos we took using a blue plastic bag and I blew some bits of hamster hay into the air for additional elements.
I remember that I hand-animated a corner pin for every cut to make it stick perfectly to the deforming sacks. Frame by frame, hundreds of them.
It’s only „pixel fucking“ if your client feedback is about chromatic aberration on pixel-sized specs of fairy dust. Everything else is just client feedback.
#NukeStudio should rename „sequences“ to „timelines“. Sequences in #VFX are either image file sequences or a collection of shots that have been arranged in sequence. The confusion for editors and artists alike is real.
There’s even a „sequences default framerate“ option in Nuke Studio‘s settings. It does NOT set the default for sequences (timelines) but for sequences (a bunch of enumerated image files).
Buying another company‘s #VFXpipeline like you‘d buy a house:
„Why are there two faucets in the bedroom?“
„Legacy support for the 2019 version of our animation software“
„Ok, and why is the TV upside down?“
„Initially our whole CG team preferred to work upside down but they‘ve all left by now and the TV is the only part of the living room we haven’t refactored yet“
There was this show where we had to exactly match font and position of burn-ins to a given template. Fair enough! Client doesn't want text jumping around if multiple vendors are working on a show.
The template had the name of one of the world's top VFX shops on it! But while trying to match it I noticed that every text field (frame counter, shot name, date) was using a different kerning. I don't know if that was the client's first test to see who's a proper pixel fudger...
Today I started to build the #VFXpipeline for a show that needs to return quicktimes in 2 different resolutions, each using a different codec and each using a different crop of the full resolution EXRs.
I see your "the studio made us remove all blue-screens in the behind-the-scenes footage to keep up the illusion it was all done in-camera" and raise you a "that Unreal Engine real-time LED background they had on set to do all backgrounds in-camera will need to be replaced in post."
With its latest update, the enshittification of #ftrack progresses. I can no longer navigate shots and sequences from the handy sidebar without using their newly designed modal popup. But due to its nature as a modal popup it blocks me from using and seeing whatever list or overview I was just working on.
Sometimes my industry is full of snake oil and #CargoCult behaviour… Today I heard that an artists used to be told to disable all write nodes in a #Nuke script except for the one they want to render as this „speeds things up“. 🙄
The 3D department is happy because I found the cause for one renderworker taking twice as long to do a #Houdini sim than an identical machine next to it.
Turns out it was me 😫
I had unwittingly installed the nvidia driver to test some stuff. This made Houdini use the machine‘s super weak graphics card instead of its Threadripper CPU.
I remember a talk - it must have been 15 years ago - by the guys who invented #morphing for Michael Jackson's famous music video. They said they had a system with enough RAM to hold 2 frames of video. Over the years, the hardware got better but the time it took to render 1 frame stayed the same. Because of course the artists put in more details.
They speculated that render time isn't limited by technology but by what artists were able to bear.
Space. It looks like a Houdini tutorial. #vfxlife